September 2004

• Vanity Fair (9/4, Orange)--Not great, but a very good job of insinuating a 21st-century feel into a 19th-century story without being untrue to the spirit of the novel. Witherspoon is surprisingly good and does not suffer from the bane of most young actresses in period pieces: I believed in her.
• Remember Me, My Love (9/5, Sunshine)--Extraordinarily sad Italian family film feints toward a relatively happy ending, then plunges back into sadness amid apparently joy. The face of the lead actor tells the whole story in the final shot.
• End of the Century: The Ramones (9/5, Ang.)--Wonderful documentary about the band that invented punk. The excitement of the music outweighs the sadness of seeing Joey, Dee Dee, and Joe Strummer, all gone now. Learned afterward that Film Fest New Haven is showing the film, though I probably wouldn't be able to get to it anyway. And let's face it: more appropriate to watch it on Houston Street than in New Haven.
• Bush's Brain (9/5, Cin. Vil.)--I bagged the possibility of 6 flicks in one day (ultimately settled for 4 anyway) in order to see this documentary about Karl Rove. Infuriating, of course, but it doesn't rise above preaching to the choir. Seemingly 2/3 of it is interviews with the coauthors of the book on which it's based.
• Bright Leaves (9/5, FF)--Wonderful personal documentary by Ross McElwee (Sherman's March) about his (and his cinephile cousin's) hypothesis that the Gary Cooper character in the '40s film Bright Leaf, about conflict in the post-Civil War tobacco business in North Carolina, was based upon McElwee's great-grandfather. The film ends up being about heritage of all varieties, including the heritages of jealousy and guilt. Brilliant.
• Hero (9/6, Orange)--Crouching Tigerish historical epic about the unification of China in the 3d century b.c. Gorgeous cinematography, as each segment in a Rashomon-like series of alternative narratives, is steeped in a different dominant color. [80]
• Criminal (9/10, YSC)--American remake of the Argentinian classic noir Nine Queens, which I saw a couple of years ago at the same theater. That was a great film, and this is virtually a scene-for-scene remake, so it is great fun, but something's lost in knowing the outcome.
• Reconstruction (9/11, Linc. Pl.)--Danish narrative mind game designed to prove something that a narrator says at the beginning and again at the end: that even though it's just cinema (and, implicitly, even though the filmmaker is beating us over the head with the artificiality of it all), it can still make us feel. And indeed it does. It's a Wonderful Life is a surprising presence here.
• Red Lights (9/11, Linc. Pl.)--Three films in one, it starts as a Bergmanesque up-close treatment of a marriage in excruciating ruins, switches to a sort of comic noir version of Vanished, and then ends up Hitchcockian. Oddly satisfying for all its genre sampling.
• Cellular (9/12, NoHa)--This is the sort of pulper that I'll probably skip once I'm carless, and for at least 15 minutes I wished I'd skipped it today. But there came a time at last when the outrageous implausibility was overcome by the adrenaline momentum and I surrendered, and I pretty much enjoyed it from that point on.
• Shaun of the Dead (9/25, Orange)--A likable zombie comedy in which at least one character who really matters to us gets bitten and has to have her head blown off. So right there we're saying it's not too concerned with playing it safe. Still, can't say I loved it: very funny at its best, but rarely the sort of no-holds-barred Stone-and-Parker (think Cannibal: The Musical) horrible hilarity that a film like this needs to succeed.
• Bright Young Things (9/25, YSC)--Wasn't feeling English enough when I saw this, I guess. You'd think something that combines cynicism and romanticism as this does would be right up my alley, but I never really connected with it. Bonus: the first I've seen of Margaret Tyzack since she played Antonia, mother of the title character, in I, Claudius.
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (9/26, NoHa)--This was a weekend for slight disappointments, I guess--maybe it has something to do with the gallstones I'd had rattling around me all week. The technology is admirable, but there doesn't seem to be a human pulse here. And zero chemistry between Law and Paltrow. And too little of Jolie.